External hard drive for expanding iTunes library?

Morris: Sorry not to familiar with the airport extreme. When I looked at doing that, the sound quality out the toslink on the Airport Express was not up to the same quality as other options (aka SB3). But easy of use and setup are of course easy. www.audiocircle.com has some posts on the airport express systems.

Sufentanil: I am going to try ClarkConnect home linux which I've heard is really easy for setting up raid, on one of my systems on a spare drive, plus it is meant to be run headless with a web ui. My next step is finding either a motherboard with 8 Sata connectors or a couple of Sata 4 port cards that are linux compatible. I will be running 5+ drives.

Cytocycle, I haven't heard of ClarkConnect home Linux. I use mostly Ubuntu and Fedora distributions. If you're using hardware RAID, just about any distribution should work fine. And most distributions make it easy to configure software RAID, too.

Most motherboards have up to 4 SATA RAID ports (though some have 2 of them). If you want one contiguous volume rather than mounting two separate RAID systems on two separate mountpoints, then consider a RAID controller such as the following:

3ware 9650SE-8LPML PCI Express SATA II Controller Card

Good luck,

Michael

Sufentanil: Thanks for validating what I was leaning towards except for the cost. I know that is the 3ware card I would love to purchase (plus the $129 for the battery pack that makes it like 5 times faster in Raid 5, without risking write caching) but for a hundred more I can buy a 5 drive NAS chassis.. That's the problem...

I'm still trying to focus on how much space and how many machines I want in my house. (Currently 3 + TabletPC) And worse how many running 24/7.

I am thinking of converting one of my machines (P4 2.4Ghz with 1GIG of RAM) which only has 2 SATA150 ports to a linux server and buy two of the Promise 4 port 300 PCI Sata Cards ($46 each at newegg and linux drivers are available) and run software raid.

Thanks again for the suggestions.
Chris

Cytocycle, why do you need to have up to 8 drives? That's the constraint that's causing it to be more expensive. You won't find an NAS with >4-5 drives at a reasonable price point. Commercial RAID racks are going to start in the couple thousand dollar range. The 3ware card is actually about your least expensive option given that constraint. If you are willing to be limited to 4 drives (1.5 TB using 4 500 GB drives in RAID 5), then try something like:

Tekram TR-834A PCI-X 133MHz/64bit SATA II Controller Card

I would advise against software RAID, because it's more difficult to configure and to recover, as well as being slower.

Michael

Michael,

Thanks, I need 5-6 drives (750gig drives.) I already have 2.2 TB of space (JBOD) and need to expand that. The Thecus 5200 supports 5 drives for $635.

I know the dangers of software raid, but actually O'reilly books are now suggesting software raid for linux. If I go hardware I'll go 3ware (as I've had friends with LSI logic chipsets fail...and they were not recoverable).

I was a Network admin for 9 years so I'm very familiar with hardware versus software raid of the past. I have a PCI-X LSI logic Raid card but no server motherboard for it.
I'm probably going to go Raid 0 and backup eSata to another external device... to maximize space and protect against other losses and actually have a backup offline.
Chris